I was at varsity, day dreaming my way through a boring lecture when I came up with an idea for a Home Server case. After drawing up a quick plan, and deciding on the hardware, I started playing with sketch up. Hardware: MicroATX board i7 chip 8GB RAM RAID Card 8 x 3.5" HDDs 3 x 2.5" SSDs Corsair AX850 PSU (Pretty much the only thing that I have decided on properly - I like it's size!) Cooling: Pump Reservoir 4 x 120mm quiet fans Tubing CPU Block 240mm Radiator (Note: I know nothing about water cooling, I just chose components that appeared to fit in the sketchup model - If i do get around to building this, I'll do a lot of research in to all things water cooling) In the plans for the case, I decided on 300mm x 300mm x 300mm The inside would be divided in to 3 'floors': Bottom being 140mm tall - this will contain the Mobo, boot drives, psu, pump and reservoir. Middle being 10mm tall - to hide all the wires in, allowing for neat wiring (i hope) Top being 140mm tall - this will have the 8 3.5" HDDs in custom made brackets, the 4 fans and the radiator (with the extra 10mm for material width) Now for the (funky, crude) sketchup models! Front View: Top View: Side View: Oblique View:
You could probably all but double the amount of HDD's on your top floor if you dropped it and the service cavity lower and stacked the drives vertically.
Thanks for the suggestion asura. Again, during a lecture, I had a complete idea rework, which I'll sketch up and post soon (I hope - exam week this week, and then straight in to the next academic block ).
I kinda realized that, I was excited to create a 'monster server' and might have overdone parts of it
View from back right: View from front right: I have the PSU fan facing outward through a hole in the side of the case - the idea being that the Hot PSU air doesn't go in to the case View from front left: I'm still trying to work out the cooling - was planning to use closed system like the corsair H60, but I'm having trouble fitting it in, so now I am looking at good air systems for an i7 2600k The board I want to use is the ZOTAC Z68-ITX WiFi (I'll probably replace the Mini PCIe wifi card for an mSATA or Mini PCIe SSD to run the OS off). The graphics card is not actually a graphics card, its a stand in for the RAID card I'm looking at. I've got 54mm of space between the HDD rack and the Right wall of the case, wondering what I could put there - considering centering the drives, making the racks holey and putting 140mm fans on each side for cooling Edit: i forgot to mention dimensions - 360mm long by 290mm wide by 180mm high
This is a modding forum, on here there is no such thing as over done. Creating things that are totally over the top is positively encouraged...lol OH, nice designs by the way.
Looks good but did you leave enough room between the back of the HDDs and the PSU for all the cables? They looked smacked together from these angles. I like the idea about the "holey" HDD rack so you can cool both sides. That will provide some great airflow.
As fitting a water solution is providing a big challenge, I'm looking at air coolers, namely horizontal ones (such as the Cooler Master GeminII S) as there is a 125mm height restriction. In your opinions and experiences, what other horizontal cooling solutions are decent for an i7 2600k?
onyl scale back your ideas if you actually build things in the ideas stage start by putting everything humanily possible in If you win the lottery watercool all of those HDDs please
What do you want to use this server for? Fileserver or database? If it's only for a fileserver then I'd suggest running an AMD E350 or an intel Atom. Fileservers don't need any CPU-power at all which is shown by all the ready-made NAS you can find. With this in mind, you can even downsize the PSU, if we're talking about a fileserver to something along the lines of a 150 Watts picoPSU. This would make the hole thing even smaller and the raidcard can be used with a 90° risercard, so we don't add any width there aswell. If we're talking about a database-server, then forget about what I said.
If I win the Lotto, I'll triple the number of HDDs and water cool it all I'm designing this server with encoding and number crunching in mind, thus the CPU with a little bit of kick. In other News, I got my Dremel today, so I can start doing mockups and some of the components
Again, at a conference, I had a clear impression rework, I will describe and post soon (I hope - the week of exams this week, and then directly into the next block academic